Communists and the Inter-War Anti-Fascist Struggle in the United States and Britain

This article offers a comparison of the Communist anti-fascist experience in the United States and Britain in the inter-war period. The focus is on opposition to domestic fascism and the comparison extends across three areas, namely, respective analyses, organization, and political violence. This article demonstrates how both Communist parties initially understood fascism as a developing trend within bourgeois capitalist democracy before they, reflecting the Comintern's shift to the Popular Front, reworked their anti-fascism into different forms of democratic and progressive rhetoric. It places Communists at the forefront of anti-fascist campaigns in the US and Britain and yet, despite obvious transatlantic links, this article reveals that the organizational manifestations of their anti-fascism diverged significantly. The final section calls attention to the role of Communists in physical force anti-fascism, and reveals that Communist involvement in violent disturbances during the 1930s (if not the 1920s) appears more common in Britain than in the US. Nonetheless, it still cautions against making too much of physical confrontation as the single most important feature defining the British Communist anti-fascist experience.

This article examines the three-way relationship between the Labour Party, the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), and describes their efforts to negotiate the delicate politics of decolonization. Decolonization had always been a politically...

The article examines the idea that books were widely considered to be the most important weapons in the battle of ideas in interwar Great Britain and focuses on the Communist Party of Great Britain's (CPGB) use of books for political education. A brief overview of bookselling and publishing in...

Ben Harker, â€˜ â€œThe Trumpet of the Nightâ€: Interwar Communists on BBC Radio.This article revisits the relationship between the Communist Party and the BBC in the interwar period, arguing that Communism was a spectre that haunted the early BBC, inhabiting the vision that shaped...

The article discusses the history of secret military intelligence activities by staff members of the periodical "New Statesman." 1930s assistant editor Aylmer Vallance was active in the British War Office while maintaining ties to the Communist Party. The World War II Political Warfare Executive...

The Second World War was a crucial period in the development of the British left, and particularly in finally delineating between the Labour and Communist parties. Communist party membership hit record levels just when Labourâ€™s own organization was creaking under the impact of war, while...

The article discusses the Irish author/poet Brendan Behan, focusing on his political affiliations during and after World War II. Other topics include information on Behan's life, particularly his alcoholism, Behan's association with the Irish Republican Army, the British Communist Party, and the...

The article presents an examination into the political connections between the anti-communist "red scare" of the 1950s and 1960s and the African American civil rights movement. Particular discussion is offered citing how anti-civil rights groups attempted to connect African American advocacy...

The article looks at the history of the left and radical progressive political and social movements in the U.S., as of 2013. The author presents a case for the view that the putative distinction between the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s and the New Left beginning in the 1960s is inaccurate. He...

Examines the nature of the U.S. Communist party (CPUSA) and its relationship with the Soviet Union. Claims of conspiracy of political subversion; Communists and their defenders' claims; Difference between ideological kinship, formal allegiance, and financial allegiance; Soviet recruiting of...